Space + Academia

Perfect magnets

me: majored in aerospace engineering to hopefully design rovers that go to other planets to perform little science experiments and find rocks

my classmates: i want to create missiles and advanced war weaponry for the military

me:

there was no women's march even remotely close to me, so i threw my own. end the gender gap in STEM! let young girls know they can be scientists!

Space! ft. NASA

It was a big year in our part of the cosmos. We’ve invited our friends at @nasa​ to recap all the stunning scientific advances that gave us a deeper glimpse into the galaxy around us this year.

JWST Showed Us Space with New Eyes

In July 2022, we saw the first full-color images and data from the largest and most powerful space observatory ever made: the James Webb Space Telescope. This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” is speckled with glittering stars, and called the Cosmic Cliffs. It’s the edge of the star-birthing Carina Nebula. Usually, the early phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but the infrared Webb can peer through cosmic dust thanks to its extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI 

Artemis I Flew Us Beyond the Moon 

NASA’s most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), lifted off for the first time on November 16, 2022, launching the Orion spacecraft on a journey around the Moon. Orion has now traveled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft designed to carry humans to deep space and safely return them to Earth. The Artemis I mission is the first part of a new era of deep space exploration. The program is designed to take astronauts back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars.

Credit: NASA

This One’s for the Dinosaurs

NASA’s DART mission successfully redirected an asteroid—the first time humanity has ever changed the orbit of a celestial object in space. On Sept. 26, 2022, the vending-machine-size spacecraft slammed into the stadium-size asteroid Dimorphos, slightly shortening its orbit around its much larger companion asteroid Didymos. Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth before or after the test. The objective was to test this “planetary defense” technique, should an asteroid ever pose a threat. Note: there are no known asteroid threats to Earth for at least the next 100 years, but NASA is keeping an eye on the skies, just in case.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

Be sure to follow @nasa​ for more!

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.

- Neil Gaiman, Stardust

i feel like the crimew thing shows how much queer discourse dehumanizes people. crimew is an extremely cool & talented person who's like. literally embodying 'be gay do crime' in it's truest form, but the minute that people find out it is a bi lesbian, suddenly thats. all they can think of her as? like no consideration of how it Hacked The Fucking No Fly List, everyone can only focus on her lesbian identity crimes. because none of the people who do this shit can ever see "wrong" queer people as people. they treat identity discourse like it's the biggest issue in the world even to this absolutely absurd level. doesn't matter what they do for queer liberation doesn't matter if they are happy, if you Do Identity Wrong all you are in their eyes are a freak who's personally responsible for lesbophobia or transphobia or w/e. funny how that works

The first JWST image is creating quite a buzz around gravitational lensing because of the sheer amount of it in the image. Gravitational lensing makes galaxies appear warped like these:

Because spacetime curves around a massive body, light bends when it's near enough a massive object, allowing us to see very distant galaxies behind the cluster we're looking at.

Here is some recommended reading on it if you wanna learn more:

HubbleSite.org

Gravitational Lensing

SYFY Official Site

Magnificent Hubble image of a cluster warping space and stripping gas

Hubble image of galaxy cluster MACSJ01338-2155 shows gravitational lensing and gas stripped from galaxies.

Google Books

Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe

"In Einstein’s Telescope, Evalyn Gates, an expert on all that’s dark in the universe, brings dark matter, dark energy, and even black holes

if you ever feel like you're not "smart enough" for STEM or didn't do that great in school, i just wanna let you know that i failed algebra 2 THREE TIMES and dropped my high school physics class the FIRST WEEK...

and NASA chose me to student research with them.

so what i'm trying to say is that STEM is for EVERYONE. if school wasn't the easiest for you and you're not the strongest in math, don't let that stop you from pursuing STEM. working hard for goals makes you a great scientist.

screw that stereotype that all STEM majors are geniuses who were building robots and knew how to work a microscope at 3 years old.

STEM IS FOR EVERYONE! BECOME A FREAKING SCIENTIST! YOU CAN DO IT!

NGC 1512 by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope